When the NRL's new chief executive, Dave Smith, was ridiculed because he could not identify several prominent players in a photograph, including Australian captain Cameron Smith, Todd Greenberg shook his head. Not because of Smith's public relations gaffe, but at the small-minded attitude of those who put more store in football knowledge than financial acumen.

As Bulldogs chief executive, Greenberg has helped transform a club he was told by the NRL, five years ago, was ''holding back the competition''. A criticism he agrees was justified because of the club's poor record of behaviour and financial performance.

Since then, Bulldogs membership has grown from 1500 to 15,000, they have continued the financially successful transition from their suburban home to ANZ Stadium, have averaged crowds of more than 20,000 for three years and built high-tech training facilities beneath the Belmore grandstand. Now Greenberg says the ARL Commission must help those clubs that have embraced change to take the next step forward.

''In my view, as a game, we've got more blue sky in front of us than any sporting code in the country,'' Greenberg says. ''We have such a wonderful product, we've achieved a lot, but we've still underperformed in capturing the commercial opportunities.''

Hence, the club's strong support for an NRL chief executive, who, coming from Lloyds International, knows more about trading shares than trading players. ''I don't think we've exploited the success of the game [commercially] as much as we could have, and that's frustrating for all the clubs,'' he says. ''I don't think there has been a systematic approach to things like our funding from state government, which is why the clubs are out searching for their own.''

Greenberg has just completed the club's five-year plan, titled ''Doing More Than Just Surviving''. He identifies research into the needs of fans, and ways of converting more to membership as an area that requires greater funding. ''We know there are 500,000 people out there who have an interest in the club, but the work you need to do to exploit that is expensive,'' he says. The Bulldogs' season ended in controversy when several players were accused of shouting abuse at a woman reporter during Mad Monday celebrations. Privately, the club remains adamant reports of the abuse were misrepresented. However, efforts to make their case have proved futile.

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Greenberg knows the adverse publicity has been hurtful for a club that has worked hard to restore its reputation. ''If I said it wasn't damaging I would be lying and, yeah, if we had our time over I'm sure we would do some things differently,'' he says. ''It did hurt. We spent five years building our brand, and I would like to think people, when they do their report card on us, will look at the whole year and not look at the period after the grand final. But it would be naive not to think it didn't do some damage.''

The Bulldogs have moved on. For Des Hasler, that is with the use of his latest cutting-edge tool - a $150,000 hyperbaric chamber bought with prizemoney from the Bulldogs' finals campaign. ''He certainly knows how to spend,'' says Greenberg, of Hasler's desire to maximise the club's edge in sports science. ''But he is almost commercially savvy enough to ask me about return on investment.''

The chamber is an example of what Greenberg says all NRL clubs should be able to offer, if the NRL and the clubs maximise unexploited revenue. From next year, the NRL will be close to level terms with the AFL on media-rights money, with both competitions earning about $150 million a season. But it is the enormous gap in other commercial revenue such as sponsorship and naming rights - the AFL will earn about $200 million compared with the NRL's $65 million next year - that Greenberg says must be closed.

He was a strong contender for the NRL chief executive's job, and was interviewed by commission chairman John Grant. ''Ultimately, I felt like they were looking for a different sort of candidate, like the one they've chosen,'' he says. ''People can be critical of him not knowing a player's name, but players won't care as long as he drives the business, and the landscape now is a business. It's a billion-dollar empire that has, in some ways, underachieved over the past few years, and the new CEO is there to achieve our potential.''